Michael White was voted Britain’s least boring music critic by listeners of Classic FM. He has made documentaries about Menotti, Britten and Nielsen and once attempted to explain Wagner's Ring Cycle on TV in half an hour. He's the author of two books: Introducing Wagner (Icon) and Opera & Operetta (HarperCollins).

How to deal with the very worst concert nuisances

The opening of a cough sweet can be more annoying than the actual cough

Peter Maxwell Davies is being characteristically prickly in wanting to fine the owners of mobile phones that ring in concerts – or so he's been reported saying in a speech at the St Magnus Festival – but you can understand where he's coming from.

Unwanted mobile melodies are the curse of the concert hall, adding coloratura embellishment to performances that were doing quite nicely by themselves, thank you. And while John Cage would have embraced the distraction, Bach and Beethoven aren't generally so accommodating. Nor am I.

The problem is that no amount of warning to the audience seems to work – be it the medley of assorted ring-tones that some places relay at ear-piercing volume before the show starts, or the satin-voiced suggestions in a come-to-bed voice that you get from Ian McKellen at the Southbank Centre. And it's no good giving the offenders dirty looks because they're usually wreathed in embarrassment and fluster when it happens; and the more flustered you make them, the longer they take to rummage in their handbags (or dig deep into their trouser pockets), excavate the thing, and work out how to switch it off.

It seems to me that there are only two solutions. One – the more draconian – is to ban phones from the auditorium altogether, and enforce the ban with airport-style detectors at each entrance. The other – less aggressive but requiring technological development – is to set up some kind of force-field in the hall that stops all phones receiving signals.

That done, we can maybe start to think about eradicating all the other nuisances in concerts. Coughing is the obvious one, but actually quite easily addressed if you're brazen enough. I used to have a friend who would turn to an adjacent cougher and with chilling lack of sympathy remark that "with a cough like that you ought to be at home in bed". Said loudly and censoriously enough, it often worked.

More problematic in my experience is the potential cougher who very slowly extracts a cough sweet from its wrapper, spreading the acoustic agony of every crinkle, crack and pop of the metallic packaging across a minute and a half before the sweet gets to the mouth.

Another is when fellow critics (who can be bizarrely unaware of how much noise they make) follow performances with spiral-bound scores that make a tearing sound every time a page is turned. Some years ago there was an incident at the Barbican where one of my esteemed colleagues doing exactly this caused such annoyance that a man in front of him snatched the score and flung it angrily into the aisle – where it struck the ear of ANOTHER critic, causing blood to spurt and a general fracas that involved house management and (very nearly) the police. A lesson to us all.

But worse still is the heavy breather. When you're sitting next to someone seriously asthmatic, wheezing like a Norfolk blizzard with insufferable persistence, there's not much that can be done about it. "Will you please stop breathing?" isn't going to get you very far. And if it does, it's likely to result a custodial sentence – though in certain cases you might just consider that it's worth the risk.